Monday, November 09, 2009

(Takimag) -- ...It is one thing for a starlet like Janeane Garofalo to defame tea party attendees as “a bunch of teabagging rednecks,” and accuse men and women she knows nothing about of “hating a black man in the White House” and harboring unadulterated racism. It’s quite another for cable-network anchors to parrot the loopy lady’s lines. Nevertheless, ape they did. So it was that thought-crime investigator Keith Olbermann broke news on his MSNBC nightly show. With his most solemn, commissar-like countenance, Keith informed his viewers, matter-of-fact, that the intensity of the animosity toward Barack Obama is based on his being a black man. Instead of arguing their “case” with reference to facts and reason, Keith and Company chose to impugn their disputants based on assumptions about their motives.

Still worse: this balderdash, framed as breaking-news, was bolstered by another logical fallacy: an argument from authority. The feeble-minded Jimmy Carter had seconded Garofalo the histrion. By Keith’s journalistic standards, this was all the proof he needed to pronounce the libel true, and apply the pejorative liberally. Olbermann proceeded to “debate” this ad hominem with the effeminate, bug-eyed blogger Markos Moulitsas, and before him with politician-turned-pundit, Lawrence O’Donnell. The shifty and shameless O’Donnell asserted in all seriousness that because Carter had claimed that conservative and independent tea-party goers were guilty of harboring and acting on racially impure thoughts, this was indeed so. After all, the former president was from the dreaded South! He ought to know! At the time Obama ascended to the throne his approval ratings ran to 70 percent. Carter, Keith, Chris (Matthews), and Contessa (Brewer) were asking their viewers to believe that between March and September of 2009, the aforementioned Americans had developed a bad case of racism rather than buyer’s remorse...Cont'd...LINK